‘But you can’t change those,’ Maria said to the photograph. ‘You can’t change your eyes.’

5.

The bar was dimly lit and Annett Louisan played in the background. The décor was conspicuously trendy, the clientele well heeled and the drinks expensive. Oliver realised that this was going to cost him a fortune before they had even left the bar. He sat on a bar stool, leaning on the counter, drinking a cocktail made with white rum and looking at his reflection in the smoked-glass mirror behind the bar. He smiled a knowing smile to himself. Things were never what they seemed to be; people were never who they seemed to be. Oliver was handsome; his clothes were as trendy and expensive as any in the bar; he certainly was intelligent, highly educated; he was a respected professional with an excellent income; and since he’d arrived in the bar he had caught the eye of several attractive women. If anyone knew that he was here to meet a professional companion, they would have found it difficult to understand. But Oliver understood. And he was quite comfortable with the reasons why he found himself in a situation like this. His needs were so specific.

He reflected on this for a moment as Annett Louisan held a particularly breathy note in the background. Oliver had never had to spend anguished hours trying to isolate some subliminally erotic encounter that would explain his ‘predilection’. It was all so classically Freudian: involving, as it did, a female cousin, a particularly languorous summer by the sea, and a singular moment in which his understanding of what it was to be a creature of flesh had been born.

Oliver’s cousin Sylvia was two years older than him. She had always been there somewhere in the background of the family landscape but, because his uncle and aunt lived far out in the country near the coast, she had not figured much in his early consciousness. Oliver’s first real awareness of Sylvia had been an awareness of her curves; when he’d been fourteen and she sixteen. Sylvia’s figure had been full but not fat: she was voluptuous but firm, sturdily, lithely athletic. She was the daughter of Oliver’s mother’s brother, but she had borne no resemblance to their side of the family: she had had her mother’s red-blonde hair and freckled skin. Sylvia had always been an outdoor girl. Adventurous, robust; but even at sixteen too charged with feminine sexuality ever to be considered a tomboy. Despite her being naturally pale, Sylvia’s complexion had been burnished a light gold-bronze and the freckles darkened by long summers under the seaside sun. More than anything else, Oliver remembered her figure: perfectly rounded breasts and, most of all, her big, beautiful, glorious bottom.

There had been a group of them that day, including Oliver’s younger brother and sister and Sylvia’s three giggling, stupid sisters. Oliver had been annoyed that so many other younger children had come along. Instinct told him that he needed to be alone with Sylvia, without telling him what he actually should do if they did find themselves alone.